politics

This time i want to talk about another philosophical question: “How much freedom should people have?”.

This is a rather important question these days. Terrorism is everywhere, security and controls are thightening up and laws are limiting a lot of the things we can do (and rightfully so in many cases!).

There is another question that is propably related to that: “Can we be free at all?”, which is even more intriguing in my opinion since it begs a lot more the question of what freedom actually is. And that is something one can’t simply answer like that.

After a quick search on the internet there are a lot of descriptions of the word freedom, e.g.: “The absence of necessity, coercion or constraint in choice or action”. Which kinda opens up a lot more question than it actually answers. Do we really need to do things, is there any necessity at all ever to do anything?

One could argue for out biological needs as human beings here; we ‘need’ to eat, drink, all that stuff. But is that really necessary? I’d say no. It is just that we need to live with the consequences of our actions then; in this case this would mean the reduction of the functionality of our biological functions or later on death. Obviously this opinion is subjective.Everyone is free to think differently here.

Another question coming from that definition is related of the word choice – do we really chose what we do? This is heavily connected to the philosophical system you want to believe in and your pov on the matter of free will. Is there really any free will?

And really, there is no right or wrong there. A lot of things could be right here – e.g. I can try to argue from a science pov as much as as I want, but the matter won’t be resolved any time soon. Our choices could be the results of our biological body – components interacting with each other through chemical and electronical signals; they also could be the result of our personality or our consciousness as seperate entities trying to make a choice somehow. I’m not the one who will answer this and as much as others are trying to do so it propably won’t be happening anytime soon (There are of course lots of other theories, opinions and all of that to this topic out there!).

This kinda show some tiny little bits of how the word freedom is connected to various other issues out there. But of course this won’t stop us from answering the question, right?

For the sake of finding some sort of answer, let’s argue from the pov that humans actually can choose – that’s how the law does it aswell. I could never argue in court that im not being guilty because i got no free will as a being. So granted we as humans chose ourselves, there are still lots of questions left. The law is actually a good point there – where is the line when it comes to laws that limit us in our actions and how much effect do they really have?

E.g. there is a lot of talk out there regarding terrorism right now. Obviously we need to protect us against that. The question is how? In some places there is a discussion going on to change the law of assembly. Leeaving the question if that would really help aside, chaing laws like that would really limit our freedom. But maybe they do so because humans tend to do bad things sometimes if they can – one could argue for and against this for hours. The important point here is, laws limit our freedom. That leaves us as individual human beings a lot less choices to make in life. Related to that I actually believe that as long as there are 2 humans left on earth, 2 humans will argue with each other so that one of them can tell the other one what she/he should do. So even if there wouldn’t be a state and the laws of that, humans can’t be fully ‘free’ because of human nature. There are still choices that we can do ourselves, like what we want to eat and stuff like that.

So after me rambling about a lot of stuff I guess there is some sort of freedom for us humans these days; it is limited though. How much freedom everyone actually should have is something that depends on personality, beliefs and morals. It is also a question that should consider what I was going on about in this post, freedom isn’t really freedom. And it could already limited by what we are.

Though there propably is a line that limitations and restrictions should never cross. I dont’t want to ask others what I should wear; I want to eat what I like and I want to believe what I want to believe in. As long as I don’t hurt others with it there shouldn’t be a problem, though sometimes there still should be limits. I never want to see my co-workers naked at work as a rather drastic example for that.

So, no definitive answer this time. Freedom isn’t easy – people tend to define differently what they should allowed to do and what not. So, everyone actually wants to be able to do a lot more than he/she should be able to do.